


Daystar

by Windian



Category: Tales of Symphonia
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cruxis!Genis, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-30
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-03-11 13:40:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13525443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Windian/pseuds/Windian
Summary: Kratos’ gaze moves to the cruxis crystal embedded above your collarbone.  “Do you know the cost those wings come at?”Genis chooses Mithos.





	Daystar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DivineShark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DivineShark/gifts).



The flickering tendril in your hand is a new fascination. In your palms it quivers, trembling from the exertion of being brought to life. How _alive_ it seems, a tiny heartbeat cupped between your hands.

“Genis! You _mustn’t_.”

There’s fear in your sister Raine’s eyes as she strikes at your hand. The tiny will-o'-wisp of fire dies as she yanks the curtains to your apartment in Palmacosta closed in a desperate tug.

Your fingers sting. You’re five years old, and it’s too difficult not to cry. Raine folds you into her arms, and her own magic flows into you, warm, washing away the pain. “You must be _careful_ , Genis,” she tells you, voice cracking with both parts guilt and anger.

Your sister has been an adult since she was eleven years old, shackled with a baby brother in an unforgiving human world. But the fear in her eyes, now, makes her look much younger.

“Promise me,” she demands of you, and her fingers tighten around your own, so hard it _hurts_.

 

Fire takes the dilapidated house from across the bakery. Another half-elf boy had lived there, a few years older than yourself. Your eyes had met at the market, recognition flaring between you. Half-elves could always recognise their own cursed blood. It had taken Raine, tugging on your arm, to tear you away. You mustn’t. It wasn’t safe.

Fire takes the house. No trembling will-o'-wisp but a blazing inferno, devouring everything in its path, the heat a physical force on your face, Raine’s hand around your wrist. A group of men hurl bottles and laugh, drunk on the destruction. “Filthy half-elves!” they shout. “Scum, living right under our noses!”

A scream fills the night. You pull against Raine’s restraint, but she holds fast.

“We have to do something. It’s not fair!” you rail.

“We can’t,” says Raine, “and no, it’s not.”

 

After the third Desian raid that month, you and your sister leave Palmacosta. You make your way across the ocean to Iselia, a village rumoured to be protected by a Desian treaty. The people there are a little less suspicious about your supposed full-blooded elven heritage, probably owing to the fact they’re not being hauled off by Desians in the middle of the night. You even manage to make friends: Lloyd, and the Chosen of Mana, Colette. By day you laugh together and play, but by night you wonder: what would Lloyd do, if he knew of your real heritage?

By night you think of fire, your boyhood fascination now tempered by another emotion. You think of the boy’s eyes in the market: impossibly blue, Raine’s hand closing around your wrist. The boy’s crime was being born. Being a half-elf does not make you a _Desian_. Yet you and your sister have been tried and judged before you were ever even conceived. And humans act as though _you_ are the inferior beings.

You think of fire, and you burn.

 

***

 

Mithos has the same blue eyes as the boy from the marketplace.

Mithos is also Mithos Yggdrasil.

He’s not in his bed, so you venture outside Altessa’s house. It doesn’t take you long to find him, sat on a fallen log, looking up at the stars, his fair hair a beacon in the night.

“Mithos,” you say, and it’s as though you’ve called him back from some far away place, as far as death, as the dearth of space. It’s chilling, how cold his eyes are, and for a moment you catch a glimpse of the millenia old angel in Mithos. But then, at your call, your friend returns, mouth hooking up in his shy sweet smile. You ought to be more afraid. This is your enemy, a ruthless and pitiless immortal being. But it’s also Mithos, your friend, who saved you, who helped you collect medicine for your sister.

_Let’s be friends forever._

Mithos had taken your hand; you hadn’t wanted to give it back. He’d moved his thumb in slow circles over the soft skin of your palm, and the world had disappeared around you.

“Genis,” Mithos says. He doesn’t sound surprised to see you. “You couldn’t sleep either?”

You want to give him a chance to explain himself.

You hold out the panpipes. There’s a brief moment of opaqueness, Mithos’s eyes going wide, and then he says, “I’ve been looking for those all afternoon. Where did you find them?”

“The Tower of Salvation,” you say, and you plunge ahead, because you can’t bear to hear him make up any more lies: “Mithos… I know who you are. I just… I want to know why.” The seams of your words split at his betrayal. Where the warm feeling in your chest had been there’s an _ache_.

Mithos’ expression goes somber. He takes the linkite panpipes, and then, offering no explanation, he begins to play.

The melody is very sweet, and very sad. It makes you think of ancient trees, standing in a still, untouched forest. The music moves through you, and stranger still, when Mithos puts down the pipes, there are tears in your eyes.

“I… I don’t know that melody,” you tell him.

He rests the panpipes in his lap. He hunches. Everything about him is heavy. “You wouldn’t, Genis. No one has played that song in thousands of years. It was Martel, my sister’s favourite. Although I don’t play it half as well as she did.”

“So your sister, the one you told me about, who was… murdered by humans…”

“Yes, that was Martel.”

There’s a lump in your throat you can’t swallow. “All those things you told me… were they lies?”

Mithos holds your gaze. “Well, I’m not from Ozette. But I was abandoned by my parents and raised by my sister, the same as you were.”

“And when you said we were friends…”

In reply, Mithos takes your hand. “I would never lie about that, Genis. You’re my friend. My dearest friend.”

The same feeling from the mountaintop pools into your chest: warmth like liquid sunshine. You’re holding hands with Mithos Yggdrasil, his thumb chasing circles on your knuckle, and you can’t bring yourself to let go.

All the same, your conscience kicks in. Eventually, you pull your hand away.

“But Mithos, you… you hurt so many people. The Desians, the ranches. So many people, suffering.”

“You have to understand, Genis. I made the decision I did thousands of years ago because the world was dying. If I hadn’t split it in two and set this system into place, nobody would be alive.”

“But…” you protest.

“I told you I hated humans before, and that was no lie. I do. I detest them.” Viciousness twists Mithos’ words, and you can’t help but flinch. “If I wanted to, I could wipe them all out. All humans and elves. Believe me, it wouldn’t be difficult. But my age of lifeless beings will eliminate discrimination. There’ll be no more need for war, for famine. The worlds will be able to be rejoined.”

Lloyd had always been the more emotional thinker. He tempered the side of you that swayed towards cold rational logic.

“But, if we could just rejoin the worlds and germinate the great seed…” you protest.

“How long do you think it will take before humanity will destroy itself again? Do you think I haven’t given them a chance? Again and again, I’ve watched them dig up the ancient magitechology to make war with one another. I know you have friends among them, Genis, but humans cannot be trusted. The only thing they can be trusted to do is to make the same mistakes.”

It hits you, now, that the boy by your side is a four thousand year old being. What must have he seen? What must he have endured?

“Come with me Genis,” Mithos says, offering his hand, his eyes intense. You can’t help but fluster under them.

“Wha— but, Mithos, I…”

“I want to show you. If you still don’t believe me, and you want to return to your friends— I won’t stop you.”

“You promise?” you ask.

“Of course. I wouldn’t betray you— not my only friend.” There’s a turn of desperation in Mithos’ voice. The hand he offers wavers.

You think of Welgaia, that empty city of angels. You think of Mithos, utterly alone, for centuries, millenia. Unaging, unmoving.

I hate them, you’d admitted to Mithos, alone on the mountaintop. I hate humans. It was a seed that had long laid dormant inside you.

Strange, how it seems like the easiest thing in the world, to reach across and take your friend’s hand. It feels like a choice you made long ago, on a night in Palmacosta with a sky choked by ash.

 

***

 

In your short anxious escape through the angelic city, you’d only seen the tiniest part of Welgaia.

Mithos’ utopia stretches on for miles, a perfectly run engine of moving parts.

The angels go about their business. It’s strange to think they are not the holy deities you’d learnt about at school, but half-elves, like you. Mithos’ city is clean, perfect. Its angels are polite, impartial. There’s no discrimination here. No pain.

Yet, you can’t help but wonder: no joy, too.

The chill had vanished from Mithos’ eyes. He took your hand, and you were flying through the city in his eagerness to show it to you. Under your friend’s bright eye the city seems to take on a different gleam. You alight on the roof a belltower, overlooking the sprawling metropolis. Mithos still hasn’t let go of your hand.

“This is the way things are supposed to be,” he says.

In the night sky float the separated worlds: Sylvarant and Tethe’alla.

You sit atop the city of angels, on a comet in space. Away from the confusion and messiness of dirt and living and _life_ on Aselia, this is a place to dream of ideals.

Mithos closes the gap between you. It’s no immortal’s kiss but the shy and fumbling kiss of a young boy. You’d kissed Lloyd like this once, when you were younger, hesitant and bumping noses behind the back of the schoolhouse in Iselia. Practise for when we’re grown up, Lloyd had said. But you’d turned down his further offers of _practice_ , because if he wanted to kiss Colette, he ought to go ahead and do it already.

(Be careful, said Raine, who’d noticed your growing attachment to your friend. Be careful, your sister told you, because if Lloyd knew your half-elven heritage he wouldn’t be half as free with his kisses.)

But it’s hard to think of Lloyd and Colette here, on an alien world, with Mithos’ lips on yours and eyelashes fluttering against your skin like butterfly kisses. When he pulls back his cheeks are burnished pink, eyes of palest blue, not the colour of Aselian oceans but of moonlight.

 

You don’t think of Lloyd at all.

 

Time passes strangely in space.

You keep hold of the days only by the rise of the Daystar, tracking its phosphorous cartwheel across the always-night sky.

With each rise, Mithos speaks to Martel.

He plays his panpipes, or speaks low, in a quiet whisper. In her stasis, the goddess seems merely sleeping.

“She’ll rule over this rotten world, purify it,” Mithos tells you. “She improved everything and everyone she ever touched.”

Colette’s fate leaves a heavy pit in the bottom of your stomach, but as the days go on the more muted it feels. You are a long way from Iselia.

Sacrifices must be made. And, the dark seed inside you murmurs, Colette is only a human.

 

Mithos gives you your cruxis crystal. In your hands, it feels like fire: it feels alive, it has a heartbeat.

“I want you to become my fifth seraphim, Genis,” Mithos says, and he corrects himself: “No, my _only_ seraphim.”

Yuan has long betrayed him, he goes on, and he can trust Kratos as far as he can throw him.

Why, you ask.

“Didn’t you know?” Mithos leans on his hand, utterly amused. The two of you lounge in your bed. “The boy you’ve been travelling with, Lloyd, he’s his son. I thought the mother had killed him, but humans are resilient.” He laughs; something in you wavers. Mithos takes your chin by the hand, brushing his thumb against line of your jaw.

“All the others are traitors. You’re the only one left I can trust, Genis.”

This is the way things are supposed to be.

 

Pronyma passes often, and she and Mithos speak quietly but intently. For her he assumes his older countenance, which disturbs you less when you realise: Mithos is only playing pretend. His swaggering gestures and contemptuous laughter: no more than an elaborate pantomime. Later, he’ll thread his fingers through yours, curled up on your bed, and whisper like a secret: “I hate adults. They’re all so selfish. All they want is to use you.”

This contempt stretches to Kratos. The seraphim sketches a small bow as he begins his report, and his eyes drift to you, and to the electric blue wings you’ve been sporting as proudly and cockily as peacock. He, distinctly, blinks.

There’s a few moments, where he’s able to take you aside. He meets your eye gravely. “Genis. Are you certain of what you’re doing?”

“Mithos needs me,” you tell him. Mithos sweats in his sleep, eyes moving restlessly beneath his eyelids. Some nights, he wakes shouting. Some nights, he doesn’t even see you, his eyes looking past you, as he screams and cries for his sister. Eventually, his eyes clear, and he clings to you, ship-wrecked sailor to a spar. He needs you.

Kratos’ gaze moves to the cruxis crystal embedded above your collarbone. “I see,” he says. “Do you know the cost those wings come at?”

It had burned, when you’d equipped it: it had melted the rest of your regrets away. Your fever had run for several days, or, at least, the Daystar had risen and set several times. Mithos had stayed by your side, wiping your brow, telling you how loyal you were, how _good_.

You’ll never betray me, will you Genis?

Of course not, you’d promised him, as he’d clutched at you, too tightly.

 

*

 

There hadn’t been a choice. You’d had to defend yourself. Lloyd hadn’t left you with a choice—

Raine sprawls unconscious on the gleaming marble of the Tower of Salvation. Mithos bends down, lets her hair fall through his fingers. You’d _no_ _choice_ —

“She’ll make a fine angel,” Mithos says. “She’s intelligent. She’ll see sense, in the end.”

You swallow. Nod. The exsphere at your throat is hot.

“What— what about Lloyd?” you manage to ask.

Mithos’ spell had hit him directly in the chest, but he’s still breathing. Which is more than you can say for some of your other old companions— Regal with his legs bent at an unnatural angle and Presea, god, Presea laid like a puppet with her strings cut. And you hadn’t meant this, you hadn’t—

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll find some use for him. Kratos may actually _behave_ himself. His son always was the best carrot to hang from the stick.” Mithos bounces in his palm Lloyd’s exsphere, bloody from where he’d torn it from his hand. “Always good to have a backup, anyway, if we need another angelus crystal.”

Mithos laughs, and the sound is is high and cruel; not the laughter of a child but of something deranged. Your exsphere is so hot it scalds. There’s blood on your hands, in your hair. To your horror, you discover you don’t know _whose_. Mithos’ voice is deafened by the blood pounding its bass in your ears. Your sister lies limp, and you’re burning. She’d always told you not to play with fire, but you always were a know-it-all, you always thought you knew better.

Mithos swings round, laughing as he tosses Lloyd’s exsphere high, only to snatch it out of the air.

“Don’t you think, Genis?”

 _I know you won't hurt me_ , Lloyd had said, and of course there was a choice. There's _always_ a choice.

“Yes, Mithos,” you reply, but it’s not really you. You stand outside your body. You watch yourself burn.

**Author's Note:**

> Check out [this](https://twitter.com/divineshark/status/960351669165977600) awesome piece of accompanying art done by the lovely [Divineshark!!!](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DivineShark)


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